Abstract
Musicophilia, or abnormal craving for music, is a poorly understood phenomenon that has been associated in particular with focal degeneration of the temporal lobes. Here we addressed the brain basis of musicophilia using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) on MR volumetric brain images in a retrospectively ascertained cohort of patients meeting clinical consensus criteria for frontotemporal lobar degeneration: of 37 cases ascertained, 12 had musicophilia, and 25 did not exhibit the phenomenon. The syndrome of semantic dementia was relatively over-represented among the musicophilic subgroup. A VBM analysis revealed significantly increased regional gray matter volume in left posterior hippocampus in the musicophilic subgroup relative to the non-musicophilic group (p < 0.05 corrected for regional comparisons); at a relaxed significance threshold (p < 0.001 uncorrected across the brain volume) musicophilia was associated with additional relative sparing of regional gray matter in other temporal lobe and prefrontal areas and atrophy of gray matter in posterior parietal and orbitofrontal areas. The present findings suggest a candidate brain substrate for musicophilia as a signature of distributed network damage that may reflect a shift of hedonic processing toward more abstract (non-social) stimuli, with some specificity for particular neurodegenerative pathologies.
Highlights
Music is a cultural universal of human societies and the ability to appreciate music is widely prized
Here we describe a candidate brain substrate for the symptom of musicophilia developing in the context of degenerative brain disease
Consistent with these neuroanatomical findings and with the previous clinical literature (Boeve and Geda, 2001; Hailstone et al, 2009), musicophilia was more commonly associated with the syndrome of semantic dementia (SD) than bvFTD; it is unlikely the neuroanatomical associations of musicophilia we observed were driven by these syndromic groupings, since the associations were detected after covarying for syndromic membership
Summary
Music is a cultural universal of human societies and the ability to appreciate music is widely prized. In the case of music processing, the neural substrates exposed by disease are extensive, including temporal and parietal areas implicated in perceptual analysis of music and musical memory, subcortical structures implicated in reward and autonomic responses and frontal lobe regions engaged in the evaluation of sensory signals and programing of an integrated behavioral response. Together, these diseases-associated substrates correspond closely to the coherent large-scale brain network identified in studies of music processing by the healthy brain
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